Outsourcing - how to make sure it's reliable

Outsourced IT is of little value if it's not reliable. William Benn offers advice on how to make sure you can count on your technology.

Last month I wrote about the critical dimension of security when outsourcing IT. Security ensures a safe environment in which the technology can operate.

The next factor to consider for any outsourcing relationship is reliability - the extent to which you can trust your technology to perform as expected.

Reliability is absolutely crucial to user acceptance, and hence to achieving business benefits from tech investments. After all, no one wants to be the next high-profile tech disaster.

A lack of confidence in the IT systems also breeds a lack of trust in the overall management and leadership of your organisation in the same way that an inefficient hospital receptionist will cause anxiety about the quality of the surgery.

It's not just air traffic control, intelligence or banking where reliability of IT systems is of such vital importance. Most systems exist within a complex web of interdependence - so predictable performance and outputs are essential for the effective behaviour of the IT environment as a whole. This may be less of an issue when you have direct control of every part of the chain - but in today's complex arena of outsourced services, infrastructure and software, the challenge can become unmanageable.

There are two key dimensions to reliability that you can influence throughout the lifecycle of any IT outsourcing arrangement: consistency and stability. Consistency means that the IT services will deliver the expected results in accordance with the agreed specification under all circumstances. Stability means that the services are predictably available and accessible, and that users can have confidence in the operation of the services.

As always, you get what you pay for in IT outsourcing. If you don't specify parameters for reliability then don't be surprised if system behaviour fails to meet user expectations. Equally, you may be tempted to set parameters that look good on paper (i.e. 100 per cent availability) but that are unachievable, immeasurable or prohibitively expensive.

The other important principle is to specify reliability in terms of standards and outputs rather than inputs. For example in an IT infrastructure system, availability is the output but the hours of effort put in to keep the system running is an input. You may be interested in the inputs (to ensure that a supplier can feasibly provide the service) but your key measure is the output.

Consistency
In your outsourcing relationships, it's essential to define the degree of consistency that's required in the outputs from the system, and how exceptions should be treated. In complex banking systems, for instance, you will want absolute assurance that the system is giving the same answer under the same conditions every time. Hence you'll require error checking, validation and audit to be at the heart of your outsourcing arrangements.

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